Heaven's Gate
by robinwitch1
Summary: Where does Little Lamplight get the supply of children it needs to stay in existence? A story about love, hope, and fungus cubes. Contains a short glossary as an appendix for those who have not played the game.


**Heaven's Gate**

**A Fallout 3 story**

_For a short glossary of names and terms peculiar to **Fallout 3**, please scroll to the end. If you have not played the game, it might be wise to glance through this first. If you have, my apologies for the redundancy._

Night: an autumn night, by the calendar, not that the seasonless year gave any other hint. Full moon. A rocky hillock with a slight depression in the top, climbable by human beings but not by most of the predators that haunted this waste night and day. A body lying high up in the depression in the rock, no more than a shadow, with a few smaller shadows of packages and bags at its side. The body snored. Other than the endless, nagging wind, the only other sound was the soft grunting of a mutant bear, a _yaoguai_, wandering near the rock, more than enough incentive for everything else with any sense to keep a respectful distance.

The Lone Wanderer woke up slowly, his head spinning, momentarily confused by the after-effects of the drug and the sudden substitution of a deep black night sky powdered with stars for the baby-blue and fluffy white mural of the heavens he had grown accustomed to seeing above him whenever he lay down for a rest, or Shania or Melissa decided to go on top. _No more angels_, he thought groggily, _painted or real..._, and ran his hands over his body in the darkness to reassure himself that all his parts were present and accounted for. They were, and one bore telltale signs of being recently in demand: his pants had been pulled open at the front and his equipage was sticky and wet. He laughed. _Should have known she couldn't resist one last kick at the can. So to speak._ He zipped himself up, wondering where would be the best place for a bath without irradiating himself too badly, and rubbed his legs, still a bit stiff from laying in an awkward position on the rock.

And that was that. Forever. He could pass through Little Lamplight once more, they said, but only to reach Murder Pass or the back entrance to Vault 87. Only once. And if he stopped, or turned back, or tried to speak to anyone, they'd shoot him. Rather a brisk way to treat a visitor, even by Wasteland standards, but he could understand. He'd done what they'd needed. Now, for the sake of peace, order, and good government, they needed him gone.

His equipment was beside him in a rough sack. Everything was there, money and goods, repaired and cleaned. They'd been straight with him. Even his plasma rifle was there; God knows, they must have been tempted to nick that, the things were so rare these days. Beside it, a chunky, mold-smelling package with fifty squares of cave fungus; they'd promised that too, and they'd delivered. A map reminding him of the location of the cache he could use for trading with them, now that he was _persona non grata_ in Lamplight itself. A fairly portly bag full of caps, which was a bit of a surprise, with a note in Melissa's handwriting stuffed into the top: _You were one hell of an nineteenth birthday present, you know! You'll be able to use this better than us. Until we meet again._ He grinned. He hadn't really wanted payment for _that_ service, though again they'd promised him.

Finally, there was a long cloth-wrapped bundle with another note, in Lucy's neat script and signed with her name: _Joseph's been fiddling with this for ages. It's a railroad rifle, but he's cut the weight a bit, got the muzzle velocity way up, and put a scope on it. He took it out with a scavenge party a while back and lined up two Brutes: tore both their heads right off. He's __so__ grateful to you for getting him off the hook. I am too. And relieved: I was beginning to think that something had gone wrong with us, living so long in these bloody caves. But now our Lamplight will go on, the way it always has and always will. PS: I hate you! Why didn't you come a year later! Joke! Bye now._ The Lone Wanderer shook his head and smiled: Lucy, he remembered, was fifteen.

He stretched and looked out over the desolate landscape from his rocky perch. It was time to get back to the real world. Six months before, he had decided to take a week off to make a trading run to Little Lamplight. Like a lot of things in his life, it hadn't turned out quite the way he had thought it would when it began.

The day that he had set out, six months earlier, more or less, had started out like a lot of other days: a tramp through dust, dead trees, and rocky outcrops, an inconclusive exchange of fire with a couple of bandits who had wisely taken to their heels when they saw their old popguns were up against a plasma rifle, wind-blown grit, glare, sweat, and two _more_ motherless radscorpions shot dead. Those things were beginning to really bother him. Where on earth were the vicious buggers coming from? Judging from the shells on them, they must have needed time to mature – quite a bit of time in the case of the giant variety – but he blasted at least one nearly every day, and there were never any fewer of them, never any change. Like every other goddamned thing in this godforsaken waste, as a matter of fact. Whatever you did, _nothing_ changed.

Oh, Dad was going to make some _big_ changes, he said, and the Lone Wanderer almost believed him, until he saw Dr. Li behind him rolling her eyes. Project Purity, meh. But it kept the old guy busy and out of strange beds and dodgy virtual reality simulators. As annoying as Dad could be as a human being, the Lone Wanderer suspected he would be an even bigger nuisance as a dog. Or maybe next time it would be a bloatfly.

There was some work on the Project that only he could do, apparently; he'd been putting it off for months, and dear old Dad was sending him inspirational messages more and more frequently. The last messenger, a lithe blond in leather armor that seemed a little too tight for her, had arrived two days ago with a brace of deathclaw hot on her tail. She had only survived because he happened to have been sitting on top of a nearby rock, idling away a boring afternoon smoking and doing target practice on passing bloatflies with the dart gun.

From the top of his rock, the deathclaws had been sitting ducks. As always, the poison darts crippled them and slowed their deadly charge to a pathetic and faintly ridiculous stagger. The girl climbed up to sit beside him, and they sat together laughing at the kneecapped beasts vainly trying to scramble high enough to get at them. After sharing a cigarette, they amused themselves by finishing off the deathclaws as slowly as possible, using the girl's .32 pistol, the smallest and weakest gun they had to hand.

It took ages, but that was what passed for family entertainment here in the Wasteland, hurting something that had wanted to hurt you. And deathclaws were too stupid and stubborn to run away. When they finally stopped bleeding and whimpering, it was already evening. They slid down the rock face and harvested the deathclaw hands, and then he peeled off her armor, bent her over the larger of the two dead beasts and took her fast and hard from the back while she hammered her fists into its riddled hide and screamed incoherently. After they both came, they collapsed in a sweaty heap behind their quarry, looking up at the stars and breathing, just breathing and listening to each other breathe.

After a while, she sat up, slowly, and lit another cigarette. "It is so fucking _good_ to be fucking _alive_ when you were sure you were going to be fucking well _dead_," she said softly, through a cloud of smoke. "All the time you were shoving your cock into me I was thinking of being caught by those things, slashed, gouged, clawed, torn apart... _penetrated_..." Her eyes glittered.

"That's when I came," she added, and fell silent again.

There didn't seem anything useful he could add to _that_.

They'd spent the rest of the night together in a nearby shack. He'd laid enough mines outside the door to ensure that anything trying to approach would arrive minus its legs, and propped a skeleton against the outside wall as a hint to intruders. Then they'd ridden each other into sleep on the bloodstained old mattress they'd found the skeleton on.

The following morning, she finally got around to delivering the message his loving father had paid her a handsome fee to convey. "Your father is getting quite worried about you," she recited in a monotone, "official" voice as she slowly wriggled herself back into her leather. "He said to tell you that you should head back to him right away. Project Purity needs you. This time it's important." She looked at him quizzically and switched back to her normal voice. "End of message. Now you can tell me... Project Purity? What the fuck? Is he trying to revirginate you or something?"

"It has something to do with the water supply."

She arched her eyebrows. "Well, that's just so interesting, I feel like going into the corner and giving my pistol a blow job. Water supply? Motherfucking _valves_?" She began to laugh. "Yeah, and I guess the real joke's on me, nearly getting killed to deliver that sad-ass excuse for an urgent message. But a job's a job." She arched her back and ran her hands over her rump. "Maybe it'd be easier to be a whore. Still way too many dangerous animals to deal with, but at least you get to do it indoors."

The Lone Wanderer had solved his one-night stand's career dilemma by impulsively giving her all the caps he had on him at the time, nearly ten thousand. She was speechless with gratitude, but it was no big deal to him. He'd done it before, many times, to men, women, settler families, lost ghouls, talkative vampires, whoever or whatever happened to be around and not actually trying to kill him when he was flush and bored. After all, it wasn't as if he needed the cash. Money was the least of his worries. He could always go back and work for Dad, or shoot another pile of the perpetually proliferating radscorpions to sell their poison to Moira Brown back in Megaton, who never seemed to get enough of it. He wondered why. Colin Moriarty, the saloon owner in Megaton, the guttersnipe leprechaun as Dad was fond of calling him, was spreading a rumor that she was distilling an aphrodisiac from the venom. He made a mental note to ask her about that the next time he was in town. Maybe she'd be back in the market for a test subject some day.

And then Whats'er'name had left at last, after he'd made her a final present of a couple of bottlecap mines to discourage any deathclaw she might run into on the trip back. "It doesn't cost me anything, I make the damn things myself," he had told her when she'd initially refused to accept his last gift. "I could do it in my sleep. Look me up sometime and I'll try to get you one of these dart guns or something. If I have the parts, and I probably do, I'm not losing anything but an hour or two of time by putting them together."

"I won't be out in the wastes much any more. Too many things want to take you apart there. Bless you for the money. Maybe I'll open a store. Or a brothel. Something."

She'd left then, in a bit of a rush. The Lone Wanderer suspected she was going to cry, and didn't want him to see it. After tidying up, he set off on another artifact hunt, this time for a lost holotape someone in Rivet City wanted. It was supposed to be "somewhere" around here, maybe. Or maybe it didn't exist at all. No one seemed to be quite sure.

After spending a few days digging through every pile of junk and dilapidated shack in the search area, he got bored. It was then that he decided to take time off for a run to Little Lamplight, Kiddie Town, to trade the drugs they needed for the cave fungus they had a monopoly on. That swap was a pretty good deal, usually. Drugs, like money, were something he always had in abundance but didn't really use much.

He was nearly half-way to his new destination before he realized he still didn't know the girl's name. _Oh well_, he thought, philosophical, _If both of us survive, I might have another chance to learn it, and if one of us dies, it won't be any use anyway._

Lucy wasn't so hard to deal with, the Lone Wanderer had reflected as he unpacked his drug stash to trade. She was one of the oldest girls in this strange kiddieland, the _de facto_ Chief Medical Officer of Little Lamplight, adult already in her maturity and sense of responsibility. They'd dealt before, many times. She needed what he brought, Buffout stimulant mostly, though not for its original purpose, and he could trust her not to cheat him or give him the runaround. The problem wasn't her, but MacCreedy the mayor of Little Lamplight, who was obsessed with making his mark on the world by being a complete asshole. At this he had become a past master.

The problem was MacCreedy _again_, and Lucy wasn't free to defy him in matters within his sphere of authority, which included trade with the outside world. She spread her hands helplessly. "Look, we need the Buffout sure enough, and I'm certain there's more than enough cave fungus to go around. You know how the stuff tastes. It isn't like people line up for second helpings. But..." her voice trailed off for a minute, then resumed, "..._His Honor the Mayor_ is worried that we might, at some point in the indeterminate future, run dangerously low. So I can't trade for more than five bottles a week. I'm sorry. It makes your trip hardly worth it, doesn't it?"

"You could say that, yes."

_No point in lashing out at Lucy_, the Lone Wanderer thought. _Not her fault._

Lucy didn't respond at once. She had a strange, pensive look on her face, as if she were trying to come to a decision about something. Was she tempted to defy MacCreedy and buy what she felt was needed? _Tricky business_, the Lone Wanderer reflected to himself. MacCreedy was a vengeful little sack of misery. No telling what he might do if he felt someone was trying to undermine his authority.

But Lucy wasn't thinking about the mayor. "There is one problem where my word is final that you can help us with. Quite a bit, actually," she began, in a tentative voice. "It's something the medical staff handles according to their own judgment. That's always been settled procedure."

She hesitated. Another long pause. Then she continued, in a reflective tone, "Have you ever wondered why this place... this Little Lamplight of ours, a community where no one is allowed to remain who is older than sixteen... why we're still open for business _two hundred years_ after the end of the war?"

He hadn't. But come to think of it...

"The last of you should have left for Big Town, oh, 180 years ago or so. Or if you stayed here as adults, died, more than a hundred years ago. Is that it?"

"Not exactly," she replied. "Big Town's only been around for a little longer than a century. Before that, anyone sent out into the wastes tended to just disappear, I understand." She grimaced. "But in more general terms, you're correct. We're not ghouls. We don't live for centuries, let alone stay young for centuries." She paused, gazing off into space, thinking, and then looked at the Lone Wanderer again. "You've met Bumble, my assistant. She's the youngest here now, six, going on seven. Where do you suppose she came from?"

"It never occurred to me to ask. I just assumed you'd picked her up somewhere, that she was an orphan that the scavenge parties had rescued, or perhaps a slave that you'd stolen, or bought and freed."

"Did she introduce you to her teddy bear? She must have. She introduces that bear to _everyone_."

"Yes. She's very attached to it. She told me it had been her mother's when her mother grew up here..." He halted, suddenly feeling foolish. How had that detail passed him by? _Must be getting absent-minded in my old age_, he thought, irritated at himself.

"Actually, I've told her more than once not to mention that," Lucy remarked. "But you know six-year-olds. And no one has ever put two and two together. As I suspect you're beginning to, now."

"Perhaps... so you aren't all orphans and refugees, then."

"We certainly don't reject them, but the supply would hardly be sufficient..." Lucy began, and as she trailed off, the Lone Wanderer continued for her, "So you have to make your own. But just about nobody I've seen here is old enough to have children safely, and certainly none of you has ever been seen pregnant. Which means... the children are coming from older people somewhere else, somewhere you have some link with. But there aren't any kids in Big Town either. And there's nowhere else your people live." He frowned in puzzlement. "So where do you get them? Do they fall from heaven or something?"

Lucy laughed. "Many a true word spoken in jest, Lone Wanderer. And that's where I think I need your help..."

The two of them walked through Little Lamplight in silence. The Lone Wanderer wondered what he'd gotten himself into this time. He's implicitly promised his assistance by following Lucy without asking any further questions, but what would that assistance consist of? Nothing too painful, he hoped. He had more than enough scars already from his stint as chief research assistant / guinea pig / bullet sponge for Moira's _Wasteland Survival Guide_.

They passed right through the caverns and took a side tunnel to the broken fence at the rear, beyond which was the entrance to Vault 87, locked tight as it always had been. He went in and examined it closely all the same. He hadn't had much to do with vaults for a while, ever since he'd fished his father out of the virtual reality setup in Vault 112. He'd explored all the others long ago, except for this one, 87, which was locked at the rear and sealed up at the front by what seemed to have been a direct hit with a small nuke. Did Little Lamplight get its children from in there? It hardly seemed likely.

Lucy's voice broke off his musings. "Hey! Over here!" She was lifting something that looked like a sheet of rusty corrugated iron. Underneath was a hatch, which seemed well-used, not coated in corrosion and dirt as were the doors to Vault 87.

"No, it doesn't go to the vault," Lucy said, anticipating his question. "It goes somewhere else." She let the piece of iron fall back into place, and sat down on a rusty bed frame. "I'd better tell you the rest of the story now."

"We don't know too much about how Lamplight was built originally, and less about any connection it might have had with Vault 87, but we do know that the first establishment in these rock formations wasn't Lamplight Caverns," she began. "It was a church, and they named their underground chapel here Heaven's Gate. Paranoid, I guess. They set themselves up in a cavern high in the formation, apart from the Lamplight caves. Their main exit to the surface ran through where Vault 87 is today. The hatch I just showed you was one of their emergency exits. The only other way in or out is another emergency exit that leads from Heaven's Gate directly to the surface, and it's, um, _quite_ heavily booby-trapped."

She took a deep breath and continued. "The church went broke just before vault-building began, I guess, and I suppose Vault-Tek calculated they could save on excavation costs if they bought the site and used the church entrance for their own approach tunnel. And so they did. They blocked the main entrance of the church in the process, but they didn't touch the cavern itself. Apparently there was still some legal action going on, and a few believers had sneaked back and were occupying the premises, though no one seems to have been there when the bombs dropped."

The Lone Wanderer held up his hand. "OK. So there's another cavern beyond this that used to be a church. What does that have to do with babies?"

"It's where we _make_ them," Lucy replied. "In Heaven's Gate. Completely separate from Lamplight, but still very close. Girls old enough to leave spend a few years there first, replenishing the population, if they're willing and if they can – if they're fertile, that is. So you were right in a way. The babies do drop from 'Heaven.' But they're not dropping any more, and we need to do something about it. Right away."

They went down a short ladder, and then Lucy led the Lone Wanderer along a long stone passageway, roughly cut but definitely artificial. There were only a few small lights. After several minutes' walk, they could see a steel door up ahead, brightly illuminated.

Lucy paused and turned to face him. "I don't think you want to pull out now, but let's go over the last details of this before we enter."

"I never pull out before I come," he said, deadpan.

Lucy blushed. "_Very_ funny, ha ha ha. Now listen. There are two girls living here right now, Shania and Melissa. Shania's nineteen and Melissa's turning nineteen as well soon. They've been here a year or two already. They're healthy, as far as I can tell, but they haven't managed to get pregnant. Yet."

"Who have they been trying with?"

"Well, that's part of the problem. We've been forced to kidnap Wastelanders for stud service. That means keeping them in custody, and basically, raping them as often as possible. Though they do tend to become a lot more cooperative after they realize they're going to live through the experience. The scavenge teams pick a subject up and drug him, and the girls have gotten proficient at the rest. If nothing happens in a few months, they give up, and we dump the guy somewhere on the surface where he can get back to wherever he came from safely, with a token payment for services. If he's been a good boy, that is."

"What's going wrong? After a year or two of that, they should both be knocked up."

Lucy sighed. "We really don't know. I'm beginning to wonder if the Wastelanders have damaged their genetic material by growing up in that radioactive dust. What makes it worse is that right now there's no male in Lamplight itself who's fit for duty. The guy you took to Big Town a while back is impotent,..."

"On top of being stupid, tiresome, and obnoxious? Sucks to be him," the Lone Wanderer interjected.

Lucy continued, disregarding the interruption, "...and he's not the only one. Not a single one of the women in Big Town now is fertile. You'd be surprised at how few people these days have all their parts in working order. And, just to top things off, Joseph, the oldest healthy male we have now, is gay. He really does want to help but he'd have a steep hill to climb to... perform. I don't want to lean on him, it's not fair."

Lucy paused. "Whereas you, sir, grew up in a less irradiated environment than a Wastelander or even a Lamplighter. And we possess irrefutable evidence that you can, um, do the dirty deed."

He gave her a questioning glance. "You know, until very recently I never suspected that deathclaws had an aphrodisiac effect," she said in response, and grinned.

"Damn." He realized he and Ms. Tightleather hadn't been alone. "Your scavenge parties do get around, don't they?"

"Pure chance, but very lucky for us. It gave me the idea for this. And saved me an embarrassing line of questioning."

"I'm happy for you." He rolled his eyes.

She ignored him, and continued. "Anyway, if you can... occupy yourself here for a while, we will try to pay you back when you go, to some extent, anyway. For services rendered. If nothing happens for, say, six months, you can give up. We'll still pay you. And if you produce results before that time, you can be off as soon as the pregnancy is confirmed."

"One or both?"

"Oh, one will be enough. It will be one more than we've had for the past six or seven years, anyway. We're getting pretty desperate."

She paused. "One last thing. If you do manage to produce, er, results, you won't be allowed back in Heaven's Gate or Lamplight. _Ever._ It's not a place for adults, and we can't have you mooning over either the mother or the child. So except to pass through to access Vault 87, if you ever need to, you're out of here for good. That doesn't mean we can't trade. We'll arrange for a cache on the surface, somewhere you can get to easily, where you can leave Buffout and strange meat and get cave fungus back, God and MacCreedy willing. I'll leave a note if there's anything else. But no more visits."

She looked at him. "I'm sorry if it seems harsh, but that's the way it is."

"I can handle it," the Lone Wanderer replied. "I'm the Vault Dweller, remember? The _ex-_Vault Dweller. Being thrown out by friends and family is something I've gotten used to."

Lucy smiled. "Then let's go in and I'll introduce you to your companions for the next few months. Melissa and Shania. They're really quite lovely people. I'm sure you'll get along."

It wasn't the worst job he'd had in his life, by any measure, though he had to work harder and harder as the weeks passed to keep it from getting routine. And he'd only promised to stay six months, or until Melissa, Shania, or both were confirmed pregnant. But from his experience so far, and the stories they told, it looked like that might be a tall order. He wasn't the first laborer in this vineyard, by any means.

Most of his failed forerunners had been men from the Wasteland, scavengers or settlers, kidnapped and brought back here as temporary sex slaves. A Lamplight scavenge party would create a diversion some evening, and when everyone's attention was elsewhere, a young man a bit too close to the darkness at the edge of the light would silently vanish. He would return just as mysteriously a few months later, looking rather wrung out, and reluctant to describe in any detail what had happened to him during his absence. Wasteland sexual mores remained quite patriarchal, and it would do no man's reputation any good to have it get about that he'd been abducted to be used as breeding stock.

The Lone Wanderer rolled over and stared at the ceiling. His bedroom was small but very neat. Like everything in these chambers and halls, it was brightly lit, and the ceiling was painted blue, decorated with an endless mural of clouds and the occasional angel. The chapel was not large, but it was complex, a warren of small rooms and passages around a large central worship area. You could get lost here, for a short time anyway. That had come in useful on days when he'd needed some peace.

It had been three months, and nothing had happened, at least nothing of the sort they had been hoping for. They'd worked up to a conjugal frequency that would have given Caligula a hernia, but it was doing no good. At least, neither of the girls seemed any closer to becoming a mother, and he was beginning to feel a bit worn down.

_Ironic_, he thought. _Here I am in what my blue-balled teen years I would have called Heaven in very truth, with no real work to do and two cheerful, intelligent, good-looking young women determined to sleep with me as often as physically possible, and in a couple of months it's gotten close to becoming a bore and a chore._ He idly flipped through his memories of his years in Vault 101. Since his father had been the Medical Officer, he had had to give the Family Life lectures to students, embarrassing the Lone Wanderer no end during his teen years. As a result, he had reflexively blocked the content of the lectures from his conscious mind. A pity, that. They might have come in useful now.

_I can't remember if Dad ever discussed the physical consequences to the intercoursee of having intercourse eight or nine times a day for long periods of time_, he mused to himself. _I'll have to ask him when all this is over. Hope it's nothing fatal._

About a week later, the Lone Wanderer started up in bed as if someone had stuck a pin into him. His father's lectures had begun to come back to him, in the dim theater of memory between sleep and waking, and one passing comment struck him like a brick in the nuts. The familiar voice had droned on in a neutral tone, _No matter how much you may want a child, don't go overboard. Too frequent intercourse substantially reduces the chance of pregnancy, rather than increasing it._ The Overseer had been very concerned that they not make that mistake. _Of course_, he thought. _Should have remembered it at once. Maybe I've been enjoying myself too much._

It all made sense now. He felt like kicking himself. The girls had just been trying too hard in the past few years, especially after the shortage had developed of their "own" men from the Lamplight community. They'd been falling on their abducted Wastelanders – and him – like starving wolves on fresh meat, looking at sex as if it were a throw of the dice, with pregnancy the double-six. But these dice wore out if you used them too often. Just about everything they'd done had _reduced_ their chances of getting what they wanted.

He set off to tell them the news, wondering how they'd take it. It was a bit counter-intuitive, after all. They might think he was trying to short-change them.

Shania looked woebegone when he ran her to ground in the chapel. Woebegone, but extremely attractive, as usual. She was a slender, dark-haired, dark-skinned beauty, who had a striking talent for mathematics and computation. In their time off "work," he'd told her and Melissa everything he could remember about the Wasteland and the ruined capital, including Rivet City. She'd been fascinated with his account of Rivet City's science lab, and had decided to head for it when she left Lamplight, to try for a job on Dr. Li's team. There, for the first time in her life, she might be able to use her intellectual gifts to the full.

But right now she was slumped in one of the pews near the back of the hall, half-snarling in anger, half-crying. "Fuck, fuckity _fuck_ fuck, _fuck_. Got my fucking period _again_. One more _bloody_ month gone with nothing to _bloody_ well show for it but another puddle of fucking _blood_."

In addition to her other attributes and talents, Shania also used some of the foulest language he'd ever heard from a woman, or a man for that matter. He was a bit in awe of it.

He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. "I'm sorry, Shania, I really am," he said to her gently. "But I think I may have figured out what's been going wrong. Where's Melissa?"

Shania leaned her head against him and looked up into his face. He saw that her eyes were red from crying. "Shit, I hope so... she's still asleep, honey. You guys were at it until four in the morning, you know. Part of the time, I was down here praying that she'll catch, but you know what a _deaf_ old motherfucker God is."

The Lone Wanderer breathed a brief prayer of his own, to thank the Great Whatever that at least he didn't have to deal with jealousy on top of everything else. Melissa and Shania were closer than sisters, always there for each other with whatever the other needed, from a monkey wrench to a caress. They'd make an awe-inspiring mommy team, he thought, if they ever managed to get past that crucial first step.

He turned toward the doorway in the opposite wall beyond which lay the suite of rooms that Melissa usually occupied. Despite their intercourse and interaction during the day, when they wanted to sleep they usually retreated to separate chambers. For one thing, none of them was good at sharing blankets. For another, all three snored.

"Hey!" Shania called as he walked away, and he turned to see what she wanted. "First dibs on you today, honey. OK? Never mind the blood. We can do it in the shower. I think there's still a chance."

"You've a great sense of duty," he replied, and gave her the thumbs-up. Then he hurried out.

Melissa was very soft, very buxom, and very fair. Wasteland life tended to encourage inordinate amounts of exercise on a meager diet, and the environment was hell on tender skin, so the Lone Wanderer hadn't met anyone quite like her before: heavy but tall, with broad hips, large breasts, moon-pale skin and long straw-blond hair. Her figure reminded him of the shape of the modernistic autos he saw on the fading Wasteland billboards: a sweep of curves, not a straight line anywhere. Not as talented in abstract knowledge as Shania, but with a knack for anything practical, it was Melissa who did the repairs if anything broke down in here. She was better with a wrench than he was, quite a bit, somewhat to his chagrin.

He bent down to wake her up. She opened one eye, and reached out her arms to drag him back under the covers with her. He nuzzled her huge breasts and then slid down the curves of her body, evading her arms neatly to burrow under the covers and emerge at the foot of the bed. When he popped up again, she looked at him with a sleepy grin: "What's up? Other than your joystick, of course."

"Shania's period came and she's crying in the chapel. Let's go down there and cheer her up. I've got something to tell the two of you anyway, might be good news."

"Shit." Melissa was up, dressed, and at the door before he could disentangle himself from the sheets and stand up. Despite her size, her movements were quick and graceful. "Let's get down there. Group hug time."

Shania soon stopped sniffling when nestled in Melissa's capacious bosom, with the Lone Wanderer giving her a foot massage, one of her favorite treats. The three of them snuggled in silence for a while, close enough to feel each others' hearts beating. Finally, Shania raised herself on one elbow and looked at the Lone Wanderer again. "You said you had some good news for us. What the fuck, _maybe_ good news. I guess that means it's not solid shit, anyway. What is it?"

He sat up, trying to look professorial, and cleared his throat.

"Well, as I've told you, my father was a doctor and he used to do the sex education classes in Vault 101. I thought I'd forgotten most of what he said, but when I woke up this morning, some of it came back to me."

He took a deep breath and continued. "Back then, we needed babies too, very badly. Vault 101 was getting a bit empty. So the classes were less about preventing pregnancy than about promoting it."

Shania giggled, "Damn. So you had a dad who had to run around giving pro-fuck, go-fuck, and how-to-fuck lectures? A cheerleader for copulation? Your teenage years must have been _interesting_."

He grimaced. "That's one way to put it." They both laughed. "But now, let's see if I can remember this in the proper order." He closed his eyes for a moment and went on, trying to ignore the stifled laughter from his companions.

"To get a pregnancy, we have first to get the sperm to the egg, correct?" They nodded. The bits and pieces of medical knowledge that Lucy and her predecessors had managed to gather included some basic sex ed, which she had of course passed on, and so both women were familiar with the mechanics.

The Lone Wanderer raised a professorial finger into the air, and continued with the next point as Shania started to giggle again. "For our purposes here, I am assuming the problem is with the sperm. If it's with the egg, I can't do much about it anyway. So, sperm. What must they do to succeed?"

"Swim like a _motherfucker_ up into the nether reaches of my pussy and screw the egg," Shania promptly replied.

"My father wouldn't have used _quite_ the same words, but basically, correct. Now, we know that radiation damage can cause the sperm to be fewer and slower..."

"I didn't," Melissa interjected.

"Now you do," he nodded. "That's one problem, but I don't think it's what's got us here. Let's approach it from another angle. Why doesn't a woman become pregnant _every_ time she has sex with a guy, provided she herself is ready?"

Shania and Melissa thought it over in silence for a moment. Finally Melissa said in a tentative voice, "I guess the bits and pieces just never manage to make contact down there. The egg's so damn small and the sperm's even smaller."

"So the more the merrier, right? The more sperm, the greater the chance." The women nodded. "And vice versa. A question of concentration." He paused, and then resumed. "Now, the male ability to produce sperm is by no means unlimited. In fact, after we take into account the effects of radiation damage and poor general health and nutrition, it's pretty damn limited in most men now. Let's call it X."

"X for sex," Melissa remarked.

"Indeed. And like any other divisible quantity, you can employ X all at once, or slice it up into portions. But if you slice X up, each portion will have a still lower proportion of the original sperm, till you get to a point where there's effectively no chance of pregnancy. So..."

"Fucking _hell_..." Shania, with her talent for calculation, already sensed what was coming.

"Just as any responsible person would if engaged in a vital task, when you didn't get results, you responded by trying harder."

"Not only Harder but his brother Hardest as well," Melissa quipped.

"But in this case it backfired. Past the first or second instance, the _more_ times you have sex with the same male every day, the _less_ chance there is of him getting you pregnant. You're trying to spread him too thin... so to speak."

"Oh my fucking God..." Shania wailed. "Do you mean to tell me that we spent all that time and effort turning those motherless, scum-crusted Wastelanders into shiny 24/7 fuck toys for nothing?"

"It was fun while it lasted, though..." Melissa mused. They both looked a bit lost.

_On with the professor's hat again_, thought the Lone Wanderer. He raised a hand for silence.

"Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple. A reduction in frequency is all that is required. That applies to end-of-act sperm discharge only, of course," he qualified. "Everything prior to that is irrelevant. So you shouldn't notice much difference in the _recreational_ side of it... provided we use our ingenuity a bit."

"That's damn reassuring of you," Shania piped up, flashing her most charming smile, "but fuck it all, I've got a hot date for tonight. Can we start the new routine _next_ week? Pretty please?"

It challenged their self-discipline to the limit, but the three of them managed to adjust to the required changes, albeit with one or two spectacular backslidings. The following month, Melissa missed her period. Literally trembling with anticipation, Lucy produced an ancient pregnancy testing kit and confirmed that Melissa was expecting, perhaps with twins. Shania was dejected at first that she hadn't caught as quickly, but her excitement over Melissa's condition made up for that. What mattered was that the "gourmet – quality over quantity" approach, as Shania wryly dubbed it, had worked once and would probably work again.

Lucy offered to let the Lone Wanderer leave after Melissa's pregnancy was confirmed, but he declined. For one thing, it would be giving up on Shania before strictly necessary, though Shania herself was so excited by Melissa's luck that she wouldn't have held it against him. Shania and he still made love, at "gourmet" frequency, but the two women spent most of their time planning for the future and asking the Lone Wanderer about the outside world, writing it all down and going over it again and again to fill in the details.

The way things had usually been handled was for the mothers to stay in Heaven's Gate until the children were weaned, at which point the children would be gradually integrated into the main Lamplight population and their mothers would depart for Big Town. His accounts of Big Town hadn't much impressed Melissa and Shania, though. There were better destinations for a pair of smart and ambitious women. Shania was still in favor of Rivet City, and Melissa would go anywhere she went. "No problem for you to find things to do in Rivet City," the Lone Wanderer told Melissa. "That old bag of bolts is a black hole for repairs. They could welcome fifty people like you and still have work to spare."

They made up shopping lists, too, of a sort: things to leave in the cache if he could find them. Mathematics books for Shania. Schematics and tools for Melissa. A copy of the _Wasteland Survival Guide_, of course, so that they could review what he'd told them before they finally left. "Remember, you may be badass, but we're total fucking _virgins_ out there," Shania said, "And who the hell knows if you'll still be around to save our asses? A written guide would be a big help."

"No problem. Do you want one with my blood on it? Guaranteed authentic, blood and book." They laughed and compromised on a clean copy, autographed.

The last month came, then the last week, then the last day, shading into what would be evening on the surface. The Lone Wanderer found himself intensely depressed at his return to lone wandering. The "lone" part of it, once one of its chief charms, no longer seemed attractive. He understood better now why his father had abandoned Project Purity when he had been born, and also why Little Lamplight was so adamant about cutting all direct links with him. But at least he was leaving his kin in a better neighborhood than musty, depressing Vault 101 and its untrustworthy Overseer, the only refuge that his father had been able to find. Lucy, Joseph, Eclair, Shania, Melissa – even that bastard MacCreedy – all solid, reliable people in the final analysis, whether you got along with them in the day to day or not.

"This is the best place in the whole Wasteland to raise a child," he said as he, Shania, and Melissa shared a last meal together. "Except maybe Oasis. And Oasis is a never-never land that survives by shutting out the world. I don't think they even trade much any more, not after they let me in and I ended up killing their god." Both the girls laughed. He'd told them the story of Harold and Bob.

"The world..." Shania said, and hesitated. "Is it _worth_ being a part of? I know we have to go out there, one day, but... dust and death as far as you can see; that's what you've told us, and the scavenge parties tell the same story. Will it ever be back to the way it was before the war?"

The Lone Wanderer thought for a minute before he replied. "We can't do anything about the past. And the future won't be any better unless we try. I thought nothing ever changes when I came here but..." He reached over and patted Melissa's stomach gently, "Some things do change. And a lot of the things we tell ourselves we can do without, we still want for the people we love."

He paused again briefly, and then continued. "I'd better get back to working on Project Purity. Dad oversells the idea, and it's hard to get excited about... well, pipes, pumps, and a purifier that never seems to do anything except find new ways to malfunction. But if it somehow works – and Dr. Li admits it might, even though she still thinks Dad is more than half cracked – by the time you two come to Rivet City, all the area around the Tidal Basin will be turning green again, a real growing green, not the green of radioactive waste or decay. Not exactly the Garden of Eden, but a beginning. Honestly, I may never care too much about it myself. I'm used to the desert, the dust in the wind. Cracked concrete and broken asphalt, dull shades of gray and brown, highlighted in mold and detailed in rust. But I want something better for my lovers, for my children. And it's never going to come about if I spend my days doing nothing but shooting radscorpions and trading junk."

Melissa spoke. "I hope your father's OK with your disappearance," she said. "We fed information that you were still alive and safe into the usual sources of rumor, so he won't be worried about that. I couldn't say anything more specific, though." The Lone Wanderer smiled and shook his head. "He'll forgive much more than this when he hears he's going to be a grandfather. And that the mother – mothers – are such beautiful people."

There was a long silence. Shania's eyes glistened, and the Lone Wanderer realized she couldn't say anything further without beginning to cry. Melissa reached out and touched his face, gently, and then Shania's, and then her own, as if she needed to reassure herself that they were all really there and not images in a dream.

She began to speak, very softly. "In the end, that's all we have, isn't it? Our love, and the good things it creates and leaves behind for others. Nothing else is real. Nothing else _deserves_ to be. It doesn't matter how bad things get or how the world goes, I've been with you two and _no one_ can ever take that away from me. It's safe in the past, where it can tell me what a better future would look like, for everyone around me, most of all for the people I love the most, but for everyone, really."

She produced a couple of torn book-leaves and put them on the table in front of her, gazing at them silently for a moment. "There was all sorts of stuff left here," she began again, "Even so long after the war. But most of it just bits and pieces. I found this poem when I came here, and kept it. I like it a lot, especially the last part." She began to read,

_Ah, love, let us be true_

_To one another! for the world, which seems_

_To lie before us like a land of dreams,_

_So various, so beautiful, so new,_

_Has really neither joy, nor love, nor light,_

_Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;_

_And we are here as on a darkening plain_

_Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,_

_Where ignorant armies clash by night._

"You are my lights in all the darkness," Melissa said, so softly now that she could hardly be heard. "I love both of you so very much. But now..." she turned to the Lone Wanderer, who guessed what she was going to say, "It's time to part for a little while, until we meet again. Our love will walk beside you wherever you may go. I hope it can give you strength if the world turns dark for you again."

The Lone Wanderer nodded. Now it was his turn not to trust himself to speak.

Shania sniffled and shook her head. She produced a small bottle and banged it onto the table in front of him, almost breaking it. "Drink this, Lucy says. You're not to know anything of how you get out of here. Oh yes, they say they trust you, but..." She half-snorted, half-sobbed. "They're a bunch of shit-sucking motherfucking paranoid _pussies_. Assholes...oh _fuck_ it, drink the stuff already. I love you so much. See you in ten years or whenever the fuck we meet again. And if some stupid cunt kills you before we get out of here, I'll fucking break into Heaven and cut God's throat, I _swear_." She put her head on her arms on the table and began to cry, not loudly, but quietly, like a child frightened of the sound of its own grief.

The Lone Wanderer uncapped the bottle. It smelled ghastly. He leaned forward to kiss Shania on the back of her head, and then Melissa, lightly, on the lips. Melissa smiled.

"Bye for now, love," she whispered. "It'll seem no time at all when we meet again. I'm not supposed to but... I'll try to get you some information on the children after they're born. We'll meet again."

"Until next time," he replied. "Take care of yourself, love." Then he gulped down the contents of the bottle. It tasted as filthy as it smelt, and for a moment he thought it would have no effect. Then someone stole the floor out from under him and he sank away from the light, as Shania began to cry harder and Melissa held his hand tightly.

Joseph climbed slowly up the rock in the darkness, carrying the last package, his custom railroad rifle wrapped in an old blanket. He and Shania had been in charge of lugging the sleeping form of the Lone Wanderer to the top of a rocky outcrop near the outside exit to Heaven's Gate. Shania wanted to stay with him until he began to wake up, but Joseph wondered if that was wise. A prone form lying in the shallow depression up there wasn't visible from the ground, but three people made a bigger target. Besides, Joseph had work waiting for him back at Lamplight.

Eventually they compromised: Joseph would go back at once and Shania would leave an hour or so before the drug was expected to wear off. The emergency exit was very close, though well hidden, and so there would be minimal risk of them getting into trouble alone. Joseph didn't like it much, but Shania was stubborn and he eventually gave in.

"You're absolutely sure you're coming back at once?" he asked, worried. "MacCreedy will have my head – or something else – if you take off with our friend here."

Shania didn't answer at once. She leaned back and looked up at the moon, and then at Joseph. "We've made our plans," she said in a soft, level voice, "and they don't include running away from _anything_. I'll see him again. I hope to God. But I have responsibilities here first. I know that. He knows that."

Joseph didn't answer. He stood there looking at Shania and smiling until Shania, a bit irritated, snapped at him: "What are you staring at me like _that_ for? I told you, stop worrying. I'm leaving when Melissa does, and she'll be here for a few more years now."

"It wasn't that," Joseph said, smiling. "It's just that we've been working on this together most of the evening, and you haven't sworn once in all that time. You sound like a different person."

"Maybe I am. I don't know. They say love can do that to you." She suddenly grinned. "Now, dickwad, get the _fuck_ out of here before I put my goddamned foot up your ass."

After his return to the world, the Lone Wanderer tried to make it a routine to visit the cache every few weeks. Conducting the trade that way made it easier than before, and it turned into one of his more profitable sidelines. Once or twice he left other things there too: a _Wasteland Survival Guide_, autographed, for them both; for Melissa, a beautiful old set of wood saws that someone had uncovered in a ruin and traded to him; for Shania, half of a university math text and a couple of engineering books that he had found in a desk drawer during a visit to the Dunwich Building. He never tried to send messages. They'd agreed it would only create unnecessary tension.

Project Purity occupied him intermittently. His father hadn't asked any questions about his disappearance, and he hadn't told him about Melissa and Shania either.

One late afternoon six months later, he passed by the cache again and stopped to leave some Buffout. It would be the last time for a while. In two days, he was due back in Rivet City for a briefing. Dad wanted some major action on Project Purity. Artifact hunting again, it seemed. Some rare Vault-Tek gizmo that might or might not exist in working order. As always, no one seemed to be quite sure.

His father had outlined the project schedule the last time they had met, ten or so days ago. He had been puzzled at how the Lone Wanderer received the news: "Everything starts in a couple of weeks, then. It might be hectic. It _will_ be hectic. You're all right with that? No pressing business? Nothing that has to be done first? You've changed." He'd just smiled and let Dad wonder about it for the time being.

He opened the cache and took out the package left for him. There was a tiny scrap of paper tucked in with the cubes of fungus. It was in Lucy's handwriting, unsigned, and it said simply, "A boy and a girl. Mother and children are doing fine. Shania's six and a half months pregnant, also healthy. All send their love."

He breathed a sigh of relief. One less nightmare. His mother's death in childbirth had predisposed him to imagine the worst. He scratched a heart into the metal cap of one of the bottles of Buffout in reply, put the drugs in, and closed up the cache. More important work was waiting. The family business, as Dad was fond of calling it.

_He still doesn't have any idea how appropriate that label has become_, the Lone Wanderer thought. _Maybe it's time for my little surprise._

He tucked the note into a pocket, packed the fungus cubes, and swung the load onto his back. Then he was off, a solitary figure trailing dust in the last light of the day, like God headed towards the sunrise to help make his new children a garden, eastward in Eden.

_The End_

**Fallout 3 references**

Those who haven't played Fallout 3 might find a few background notes useful.

**People and people places**

The action of the story is set in the **Capital Wasteland**, or **Wasteland** for short. This is the area around the ruins of Washington, D.C. The nuclear war two centuries before has changed the world's weather to a uniform late summer or autumn, and rain has become very rare. There is still a considerable problem with radioactive contamination, especially of the water. As a result of the climate change, many streams and rivers have dried up, nearly all the plant life is dry and dead, and dust blows everywhere. (This is **not** a good game to get into if you're prone to depression - the best word to describe it is perhaps "desolate.")

The protagonist is often referred to as the "**Lone Wanderer**," because of his solitary search for his father, or the "**Vault Dweller**," because he grew up in Vault 101. He/she also has a "real" in-game name, but that varies according to the player's taste (as do the player's gender, race, facial appearance, and hair style).

A **Vault** is a large underground fallout shelter, self-sufficient in food and power, built pre-war by the Vault-Tek company. There are a number of these in the Wasteland. Although advertised as refuges, most in the Washington D.C. area were covertly used for human experiments of different types, with uniformly disastrous results for those inside them (several of those that the player explores in the course of the game have horrifying back stories).

**Vault 101**, where the Lone Wanderer grows up (and from which he has to flee at the beginning of the game) is an exception in that it actually has been functioning as a long-term shelter. It is supposed to have been completely cut off from the outside world since the day the bombs fell to the time of the game. As the introductory narration says, "This is where you were born. This is where you will die. For in Vault 101, no one ever enters, and no one ever leaves." This turns out to be a bit less than the truth.

**Vault 87** has had its main door hopelessly jammed by the blast from a nuclear explosion. Its rear entrances can be reached from Little Lamplight (see below), either directly or through Murder Pass, but in the story, and until late in the game, it remains locked and inaccessible.

**The Lone Wanderer's father**, or **James** (though no one but his old colleague Dr. Li calls him that) is obsessed with reviving Project Purity (see below), motivated by the guilt he feels at abandoning it when the Lone Wanderer was born. He is driven but extremely eloquent, and has persuaded Dr. Li of Rivet City (see below) to join the project again. He also wants his son/daughter to work with him; in this story, as is possible in the game, the child is rather reluctant to comply at first. At one point in the game, the Lone Wanderer has to rescue his/her father from a virtual reality simulation in Vault 112, in which he has been turned into a dog.

**Megaton** is one of the largest settlements in Fallout 3, and the nearest to Vault 101. It is a walled town named for the unexploded nuclear weapon it was built around, which some of its residents worship (one of the player's first jobs is to defuse this thing – or set it off). **Colin Moriarty** is an Irishman who runs a bar there, talkative but untrustworthy. **Moira Brown** is the proprietor of Craterside Supply, an important center for trade. She is a highly intelligent but eccentric inventor and author who hires the Lone Wanderer to be blown up, crippled, and radiation-poisoned (among other things) as part of the research for her _magnum opus_, the _Wilderness Survival Guide_.

**Rivet City** is the hulk of an old aircraft carrier that grounded when the water level close to shore dropped. It is the second large settlement in Fallout 3, and the most attractive destination for immigrants and refugees, since it is highly defensible and has plenty of room for new people (Megaton is already a bit crowded). The carrier's science bay is occupied by **Dr. Madison Li**, a former colleague of the Lone Wanderer's father in Project Purity (see below), who is still working on water purification on a smaller scale.

**Project Purity** is an attempt to build a gigantic water purifier in the former Jefferson Memorial, in order to remove radioactivity and other pollution from water in the area and thus restore its environment. The bugs were not yet worked out of the system when the Lone Wanderer's mother, one of its most enthusiastic proponents, died in childbirth and his/her father left to take the child secretly to Vault 101 to grow up safely. The Lone Wanderer's father feels extremely guilty about leaving Project Purity in the lurch (it came to a halt shortly after he departed) and this contributes to his obsession with getting it running again.

**Little Lamplight** is an underground children's town which expels its residents when they reach the age of 16 (or 18 – this point is a bit unclear). It was founded by the survivors of a school trip who were visiting the Lamplight Caverns nature attraction when the nuclear attack occurred. They grew extremely distrustful of adults when their teachers proved incapable of handling the situation, and decided to allow only children to live there. "Little" Lamplight, which is led by an elected mayor, is entirely self-sufficient and well defended, and deals with the outside world on its own terms. The Lone Wanderer, one of the few adults tolerated as a visitor, trades Buffout stimulant drugs for cave fungus (used to treat radiation poisoning) with Lucy, an older girl who is Little Lamplight's chief medical officer. Lucy uses the Buffout to make a treatment for rickets, which is a constant threat to these cave-dwellers. [Note: In the game, Lucy is closer to 12 years old than 15; I have adjusted several of these details for story purposes.]

**Big Town** is where the grown children thrown out of Little Lamplight are supposed to go, and where most of them end up. Promoted to the departing as a paradise of adulthood, Big Town is actually a sad-ass collection of shacks repeatedly victimized by slave traders and other hostile forces. At one point, the Lone Wanderer is tasked with rescuing some of its kidnapped residents and teaching them how to defend themselves. Later, he or she can choose to escort a former Lamplight resident to Big Town: throughout the trip, the person in question insists on behaving in an extremely irritating manner, and most players are strongly tempted to shoot him.

**Oasis** is a hidden valley to the north, with luxuriant vegetation, though the water is still tainted with radioactivity. The inhabitants at first attribute the unusual fertility of the area to a talking tree, which they proceed to worship as a god. However, when the player speaks with this "god," it turns out to be a miserable being, a former ghoul, Harold, entangled with a tree that had begun growing in his head, Bob. Harold's only request is that the player kill him, since he is utterly tired of life rooted to one spot and sick of being worshiped. The player has the option to do this or to make one of several other responses to Harold's request.

**Slaves** are sometimes encountered in the game, and there is a slave market at Paradise Falls. One of the player's most important side quests (since it gets him the schematic required to craft the dart gun) is to help a group of runaway slaves establish a center of resistance in the remains of the Lincoln Memorial. Weak settlements such as Big Town are sometimes raided by slavers, though they stay well away from Megaton and Rivet City.

**Creatures, things, and the undead**

A _**yaoguai**_ is a large mutant bear. These are hostile and extremely dangerous, but can be tamed or "befriended" by middle or high level characters and a few NPCs, after which they will leave their "friends" alone or even attack enemies on their behalf. It is assumed the Lone Wanderer and the residents of Lamplight have this ability. This makes the _yaoguai_ wandering around outside the entrance to Heaven's Gate a very effective guard dog.

A **radscorpion** is a mutated giant scorpion. They come in two varieties, large and larger. They attack people on sight. After they are dead, the poison glands in their stingers can be extracted and sold for a considerable profit.

A **deathclaw** is a giant mutant chameleon (about twice the height of a person), originally genetically engineered for military purposes. Deathclaws are invariably hostile to human beings, and their size, speed, cunning, tough skin, sharp teeth, and vicious set of can-opener claws make them deadly enemies. The best defense against them is the dart gun. This fires poison darts that paralyze their limbs and slow them down to less than the player's speed, after which they are much more easily dealt with.

A **bloatfly** is a overgrown mutant housefly that attacks by spitting, extremely annoying but not very dangerous.

A **railway gun** is a crafted weapon (that is, built by the player out of parts s/he has to find in various places and assembled according to a schematic) that fires standard railway spikes at high velocity. Since these spikes are easy to find and the gun is reasonably powerful, the railway gun is one of the more useful crafted weapons. It occasionally succeeds in nailing still-living targets to the wall or the floor.

A **dart gun** is a crafted weapon, a rubber-tubing gun that fires ordinary pub darts dipped in concentrated radscorpion venom. The darts do not do a great deal of damage at once, but the poison drains health and cripples the limbs, slowing the target down. This confers a critical advantage when dealing with large, fast enemies such as _yaoguai_ and deathclaws. It is also completely silent and quite accurate, making it ideal for sniping and surprise attacks.

A **bottlecap mine** is a crafted explosive with a proximity fuse that is several times more powerful than a standard fragmentation mine. A single bottlecap mine will kill, or at least severely injure, a deathclaw.

**Caps** - Nuka-Cola soft drink bottle caps - are the general currency of the Wasteland. Some prewar United States paper currency is still available and in demand, to a certain extent, but not for everyday purposes of trade. Caps are also one of the components of bottlecap mines.

**Ghouls** are people whose bodies have responded to massive radiation overdoses by the degeneration of the outer parts of their bodies and the near-immortality of their central systems. (Here and elsewhere, the scientific assumptions of Fallout 3 are drawn mostly from 1950s science fiction rather than from anything more realistic.) A few ghouls the player meets were born more than two centuries earlier and personally witnessed the nuclear war. They retain human intelligence and emotions, and tend to be very self-conscious and insecure about their condition, which makes them resemble noseless lepers or animated corpses in a poor state of preservation. Many of the game's characters are dismissive or hostile to ghouls, but there are many advantages to keeping on good terms with them.

**Vampires** in Fallout 3 are quite rare, only found in one location. They are friend or foe to the player depending on how he/she treats them. They are much more useful as friends. Their leader is given to long, eloquent speeches about his plans to teach the vampires how to fit into human society without attracting hostility.

**References**

The poem Melissa quotes toward the end is the last stanza of "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. Her text varies by a few words from the original, mostly substitutions for old-fashioned words.


End file.
